Let’s think about how this valuable environment could be used in Varkaus - Yle visited a unique, 200-year-old industrial milieu

The Old Varkaus area is a nationally significant built cultural environment.

In Varkaus in Pohjois Savo, they want to raise the city’s old industrial environment to people’s awareness. Theft has more than 200 years of industrial history.

Future clinics have been organized this week in the culturally historically valuable old Varkaus area. Their idea has been to think especially about the fate of Tehtaa’s school, which is approaching a hundred years of age. Spaces for the Varkaus museum, for example, have been planned for the school.

In Yle’s live broadcast on Friday, it was revealed that remote work spaces and a cafeteria have also been proposed for the school.

A woman dressed in red jumps from a blue wooden pole in a light, bright concrete house. — Hanna-Kaisa Melaranta considers Tehtaa’s school to be one of the symbols of theft. Inside the school, he is startled by a stairwell post that has been jumped by thousands of schoolchildren over the years.

Old Varkaute includes numerous buildings near the current Stora Enso factory. The protected building stock includes, among other things, the old workers’ residential area, where the cultural center Taideniitty, opened this year, operates, among other things.

– These are the origins of Varkaus, for which the city is known. The factory’s school needs a lot of renovation, and funding for it will be considered by the city council as part of the budget next week, says Hänninen.

A woman dressed in red and a man dressed in brown in an interview with a dark-haired journalist in the gravel yard of a red brick house. — Varkaus city manager Joonas Hänninen (right) and city museum director Hanna-Kaisa Melaranta were interviewed by journalist Marianne Mattila in old Varkaus on Friday.

You can watch the recording of the live broadcast from Varkaus below.

*Story edited at 13:25: Updated throughout.*